When I
arrived at Columbia as a wretchedly skinny, overgrown, stoop-shouldered
freshman, it was just a few years after Columbia’s Jack went on the Road and Columbia-expelled
Allen started to Howl. Thinking of myself as their heir apparent, I skipped
orientation and the opportunity to learn the words to the college’s fight song,
Roar Lion, Roar, to race over
to Broadway where at a shop that specialized in “collegiate wear” I bought a
tweed jacket with leather patches already sown on the elbows, a pipe, and an
beret imported from France.
I was eager to join the Beats and knew that to do so, newly outfitted, I would
need to find a place for myself at their haunt, the West End Bar, which was
just down the street from the Stag Shop where I bought my existentialist outfit. This seemed strategic since I saw the putting
on of these cultural accoutrements to be essential to the life of the
poet. I had hopes that the bartender
there might tell me where Allen and Jack had perched; and while puffing on my
pipe (you could still smoke in bars), adjusting my beret to just the right
angle, and blowing the foam off my pint (you could drink at 18), I would be
inspired.
I did settle in there, becoming a version of a “regular,” often cutting Comparative
Anatomy lab and my dogfish dissection (becoming a doctor was the backup plan to
not having my soon-to-be-penned poems
published by City Lights or in the Evergreen
Review), drank my beers--sometimes seasoned with forced tears--and waited
in vain for words to come to me.
Though in Ginsbergian terms I felt sufficiently hysterical and naked, few
did.
* *
*
So in pursuit of my alternate plan I devoted just enough
of myself to my dogfish’s cranial nerves in an attempt to earn at least what at
the time were called “gentlemen’s C’s.”
In fact, I was good enough at dissection that my fish was stolen from
the tank in which it was stored between lab sessions. Pre-meds were a competitive lot, seeing themselves
in competition with one another for coveted spots in top-ten medical schools;
and anything they could do to elevate themselves on the grading curve, including
lowering your standing, was something to which they dedicated themselves.
It was a good thing, therefore, that I discovered that
the lab’s side door led to the amphitheater classroom where the great Lionel
Trilling held forth on the immortals of Modern Literature—Conrad, Proust,
Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, Nietzsche and of course his beloved Freud. If I couldn’t find enough inspiration at the
West End perhaps I could with Trilling.
I would poke away at the dogfish for a while; and when
the lab technician went out for a smoke I would slither through that door and,
wrapped in my rubber apron and gloves, sit on the steps, taking it all in—less
his critical insights about Mr. Kurtz than his performance as he gestured in
his elegant tweeds (I was clearly right about the importance of the proper clothing),
the very embodiment of the Liberal Imagination.
If I was not to be Ginsberg, I at least wanted Trilling’s posture.
He was aware of me—not because of anything I might have
offered but, because of my outfit, hungry look, and the piercing smell of
formaldehyde that emanated from me. I
noticed him taking note of my presence, nodding as if to say, “It’s all right,”
as if he knew the implications of everything
that was behind that door and how, if fate had turned out differently for him,
this Jewish god of literature might himself,
a few decades earier, have been found bent over his own dogfish in that very
same lab, and someone else would be astride the lecturer’s platform.
Though I found myself drawn more and more toward the study
of literature than its creation, I did not fail to maintain my status at the
West End. Especially since I was at last
finding inspiration there—not poetic, but carnal. For slinking on a stool at the other side of
the horseshoe-shaped end of the mahogany bar was a girl all in black—black leotard,
black tights (cut off at the ankle), black Victorian jewelry, black nails, black
eye shadow, black hair, and, most alluringly, a black beret. If she was not a muse for poetry, for certain
she was one for lust.
She was, I learned, Lydia Lichter from East Orange, New
Jersey and was enrolled at Barnard. She
emphasized “enrolled” because she was proud to proclaim that she rarely
“attended.” She was training to be a
dancer, a modern dancer, and was “taking” (dancer-talk for studying) with
Martha Graham. This left her no time for
plebian lectures and recitations. Her
life was devoted to learning Graham’s intricate technique, sequences of
movements composed mainly of violent pelvic contractions, which sounded to me,
pre-med that I sadly was, very much like endless hours of childbirth. Or perhaps something else, excitingly
different, that was still not part of my experiential vocabulary.
In my clumsy way, I managed to summon enough gumption to
engage this vision in chiaroscuro when I learned with whom she was taking. Culturally still very much deprived, Martha
Graham at least I had heard of. Attempting
to be witty (a highly valued trait of Mr. Trilling’s that I was desperate to
acquire), I said, “I thought she was dead.”
“You should be so dead,” Lydia snorted and turned back to
her Dance Magazine and Campari and
Soda.
From some inner source of resolve, of which I had
hitherto been unaware, I pressed on, yet with a stammer, “I know that was
stupid. I’ve never known a modern dancer
before and couldn’t think of anything witty to say.”
“You have a lot to learn,” she said, swivelling away from
me again, “about both dance and wit.”
Though embarrassed, not attempting to make eye contact, still
I pressed on, “I would like to know more about dance. Modern dance. Are you performing as well as
taking classes?”
“I take ten classes a week, all either intermediate or
advanced. Martha even has me demonstrate
and so I’m hoping that she might let me join one of her companies. Not the one that performs in New York. I’m far from that. But I’m good.” She leaned toward me provocatively, I took in
her Campari vapors, “Very good.”
I had never known anyone who so unabashedly would claim
to be good, much less very good about
anything, and who would be so matter-of-fact calling someone as olympian as
Martha Graham Martha. Coming from a world of doubt and equivocation,
I was utterly transfixed.
“Do you think, maybe . . .”
“Yes, I would like that.
In fact, this Saturday night there is a Merce Cunningham concert. I love Merce
and for you it would be a good beginning.”
And with arrangements agreed to she ran off. Actually, danced off. Though with no visible Graham contractions.
Martha and Merce and beginnings. I drew hard on
my pipe and adjusted my beret. Allen and Jack and even Lionel will
have to wait.
Of course it came to nothing. Actually, it turned out to be something of a
disaster.
* *
*
We had agreed to meet in front of the City Center at
7:00, buy tickets, see the concert, and then have dinner. She had been quite precise about the plans,
including that she would pay for the tickets and I would pick a place to eat
and pay for that.
I arrived ten minutes early and had time to gape at the
gathering crowd. All clearly dancers who
seemed to know each other, with everyone sheathed in obligatory black. Then in a swirl, Lydia appeared, kissing cheeks
and air as she weaved her way toward me.
She was wrapped in layers of coats and scarves and fur
tails, and as she glided weightlessly I felt that nothing I was about to see
inside would equal this performance—it was as if she had choreographed and
costumed her entrance so that she and her layers became a single organism. But no one but me seemed to notice.
We sat in the third balcony but even from that great
height it was evident that Merce was majestic.
I was thrilled to be there, especially at Lydia’s side and as a part of
her world, but I did not understand anything that he did on stage.
Lydia had told me that he believed in chance, to be more
precise in “uncertainty.” That his work
was influenced by that of Werner Heisenberg, the physicist who had discovered
the Uncertainty Principle. Merce
incorporated those ideas in his choreography, which meant that he provided what
she called frameworks within which his dancers were to move but, following
chance, they were expected to improvise, allowing uncertainty to inspire and
guide them.
To help chance along, Merce worked with the artist Robert
Rauschenberg who designed the scenery, which pretty much consisted of a
battered bicycle suspended from a rope above the stage (Lydia told me how much
she loved Bob’s work) and with
composer John Cage, Merce’s lover she whispered, who, at this performance
provided “music” (Lydia called him “Cage” and it “sound”) from a series of
radios and tape recorders from which, by turning their dials randomly, he produced
the cacophonous sound of uncertainty itself.
Merce and his dancers, under the spell of the swinging
bicycle and, to me, Cage’s noise, lurched into a series of movements that
looked more like twitches than the seamless grace of the ballet dancers I had
seen on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was so discordant, so shrill, so
disjointed, and painful, even to the point of boredom (it went on uninterrupted
for ninety minutes), that I was certain that I was in the presence of
genius.
Above the sounds that boomed from the amplification
system and ricocheted off the fretted arches that supported that doom of a
room, I could hear Lydia moaning. I was
convinced then, by that, that I was privileged to be witnessing Great Art.
She hung on my arm as we departed, heading for a place a
worldly roommate of mine had recommended, La
Cave Henri IV, just around the corner.
“Very French,” he promised, adding with a wink and elbow dig, “And tres romantique.” I was taking Intermediate French and thought,
as Lydia had been my guide to modern dance, I could be hers in gastronomie.
Lydia leaned into me as we fought the wind, her fur tails
whipping my face. It was cold and we
were pleased to find, I should not have been surprised--it was a cave--that the restaurant was snuggly
below street level. We descended the
steps and entered the dim room. So
darkly romantique that it took a
moment for our eyes to adjust and for us to find our way to the table that had
been reserved for us. It was perfect,
under a barrel-shaped brick arch that supported the sidewalk above. We squeezed into the banquette, nestling side-by-side.
I could feel Lydia shivering against me while the voice of Edith Piaf
filled the room. We were no longer in
the world of uncertainty. I was back on
the more familiar Newtonian ground of cause and effect.
The table was lit by a candle that was stuffed into the
neck of a wine bottle, so encrusted with dripped wax that I was certain it had
held candles since the time of Henri IV himself.
The waiter, le
garcon, glided over toward us, sheathed in a floor-length white butcher’s
apron, shirt sleeves held in place by what looked to me like small garters, a
folded towel over one crooked arm, and two menus and a wine list in the other,
“Monsieur. Mademoiselle,” he said with a slight bow
as he handed them to us. “Desire vous a drink, an aperitif before ordering?”
I answered for both of us, rolling my r’s as best I
could, “Non merci. We’ll be having wine with dinner.” I had brought enough money for food and wine
but not aperitifs.
“Let me tell you that to begin we have fresh escargots this evening. The chef recommends them. This is very unusual for this time of
year. Le hiver.” And wth that, like an Apache dancer, snapping
his starched apron, he spun on his heel and departed, leaving us to peruse the
menus. Piaf wafted over us. This was a taste of life as I had only
imagined it.
Lydia roused me from my thoughts, suggesting, “Why don’t
you order for the both of us, though I love escargots
and prefer red wine.”
“I do as well,” I lied, I wasn’t in truth sure just what escargots were, “How about two of them
and maybe some trout?” Truite I knew.
“But I really prefer red
wine,” I wasn’t sure what she was signaling, “Maybe some chicken or veal? That would work.”
I was squinting at the menu. It was very dark in spite of the sputtering
candle but I still needed to see if they had any chicken and how much it
cost. Thankfully, I could make out that
they did and it was affordable. “Sure—I
think we’ll have two escargots and deux chickens.”
Before I could call for him our garcon was back at the table, “We’ll have two of the coqs and two of the specials. Escargots.”
“You mean, bien
sur, les coqs au vins as entrées, non?”
“Of course. Oui.”
“And pour boire?”
“Do you have
red wine? Rouge?”
I sensed the
beginning of exasperation; and with a nod and perhaps a wink toward Lydia, he
said, “Sans doute. Beaucoup. Many.”
And with that he unceremoniously reached across the table, picked up the
Carte du Vins, and plopped it in
front of me open to the Vin Rouge
plastic covered page. As he was doing
that, Lydia asked if I would get up so she could slide out of the booth. She wanted to “freshen up.”
The waiter
hovered over me impatiently, tapping his fingers on the menus he clutched against
his chest as I scanned the wine list, looking for something that sounded
sophisticated yet wasn’t too expensive.
“How is the Beaujolais Village?”
I asked in a half voice, not looking up, to avoid eye contact and any hint of
chastisement since I wasn’t at all sure of my “j” pronunciation.
Without
responding, he turned on his heel and disappeared into the shadows.
Lydia
returned, looking even more radiant.
Whatever she had done to freshen up had worked. “Did you order the wine? On a night like this I could surely use
some.” And as if on cue our waiter was
back and in an intricate twisting of hands and wrists popped the cork, which he
passed to me. Nervously I began to roll
it back and forth on the tablecloth. He
stood there immobile, waiting, looking from me to Lydia, back to me, and then
at the ceiling. Now clearly fed up with
me, he wrapped the bottle in a napkin and poured about a half inch in my glass,
cradling the bottle in his arm as if wanting me to see and read the label. It was too dark for that.
I was also
beginning to feel exasperated, thinking how improper it was of him to serve me first, pour so little, and then to stand there all puffed up in Gallic hauteur
as if he was a potentate. I was getting ready to say something, but thought I
would begin by just glaring at him.
Which I did. We locked eyes. It was a test of good manners and
testosterone.
He took a step
back and I began to feel in command of the situation. After all we had just been with Merce and Bob
and Cage while he had been prancing around in his apron in a basement of a
French restaurant.
I turned to Lydia,
who I assumed would be feeling almost as much pride as I. She leaned toward me, under lit by the light
of the throbbing candle and thus made more mysterious, whispered, “He’s waiting
for you to taste it.”
I was
confused, “To what?
“You know, to
taste it to see if it’s turned.”
“Turned into
what?” I sensed doom lurking.
“To see if it
tastes all right.” Was I sensing even
more exasperation? “To see if you want
to send it back.”
As I was about
to say, “But I would never do that,” the garcon
poured a splash into Lydia’s glass, sneering in my direction, “Mademoiselle? Peut-etre vous voudrais le gouter?”
And in perfect
French, with all “r’s” rolling and every “j” aspirated, Lydia raised the wine
toward her blackened lips and said, “Avec
plaisir.” She seemed at first to
inhale it, dipping her nose well into the bulging goblet, and then, after
swishing the wine from cheek to cheek, she said, “C’est bien. Merci. Il est
un peu jeune, n’est-ce pas?” She
nodded to him and he filled her glass and, with a further look of rebuke, mine.
Silence
descended between us and I barely noticed when the escargots arrived, set in their specially indented dishes with what
seemed like surgical instruments on the side.
Needless to say I had no idea what to do with either the creatures in
the shells or the tools designed for their extraction. Without a word, Lydia simply reached across
and showed me what to do.
It would take
much more than that to show me what to do.
I clearly did not know what to do about many things. Though I vowed that come Monday, if I lived
through the rest of dinner and the subway ride back to Columbia, I would stop
being a chemistry major and switch to English.
I could still be a pre-med, but I needed to learn many, many things from
Lionel Trilling. That much I knew.
*
* *
I was formally
and officially enrolled next semester in Trilling’s course in Modern Lit, along
with 150 other Jews and the occasional gentile, the Jews seeking to rise from
the cultural shtetls in which they
were hatched. None more eager than I,
still raw from the humiliations in La
Cave.
I sat now in
an actual chair, no longer huddling on the lab steps. And in place of that rubber apron I broke out
my Stag Shop tweeds, leaving the beret and pipe behind in the dorm, thinking
they would draw too much attention to me—I needed to be inconspicuous as I made
my way by stealth into this new and hermetic world.
I knew immediately that I
was where I needed to be because during the very first class, Trilling prowled
the lecture platform, tossing his leonine head, stopping by the window with his
great brow aslant so as to catch the flat rays of late afternoon light that
illuminated him like an icon, his very first words were something like—
“A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual
from the tyranny of his culture and to permit him to stand beyond it in an
autonomy of perception and judgment.”
Do you see what I mean? The “tyranny of my culture.” Whatever my parents were paying in tuition, I
at least was getting their money’s
worth.
Further, now on the other
side of the room, my side, turning to us, to me, lowering his head and white
mane, Trilling intoned--
“All great art, and today all great
artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It
springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but
deformed in factories whose inspiration is self.”
Do you hear that Lydia?
Merce? Cage? Martha?
All of us anguished souls--Vin
rouge for everyone. My treat.
Through that
enchanted semester, paying close attention to the texts, Trilling raised
questions about how we live our lives (thank you D.H.), about the character of
good and evil (much appreciated, Friedrich), about the roles played by culture
and biology (Sigmund, thank you), and the ambivalences when making moral
choices (T.S., my new best friend). We
came to look for something in Trilling that went beyond the insights of
ordinary literary criticism. We expected
something closer to wisdom and transformation.
He was so
exalted, so radiant, existing so much in his own world of thought that as mere
mortal undergraduates we took in that wisdom crumb by crumb. Never was any of it directed toward any one
of us or the result of anything we might have croaked back to him when he posed
a question to the room. That wisdom was
palpably present, like the air itself, a rich oxygen of thought.
But there was at
least the opportunity to write something for him, actually to him—the term paper about which he gave no guidance whatsoever,
particularly how many pages it needed to be.
Just, write a paper of any length about any of the authors we have been
reading. We knew by this that he was
taking us seriously.
I decided to
take a chance—to write about Kafka, about whom he confessed, after reading The Trial again (he actually, year after
year, reread the texts under
consideration!), when he confessed that he did not have anything fresh to say
about it, though his lectures certainly sounded fresh and imaginative to his
disciples.
My paper was on
“Farcical Elements in The Trial.” Whatever was possessing me to take on a book
about which he confessed he did not have anything fresh to say? I dropped all other reading, cut my other
classes, and gave up my favorite pastime, sleep, so I could hone and rehone the
paper. After a week of frantic effort,
I stumbled to his office, having redrafted and retyped it for the fourth
time. Only his deadline stopped me from
working on it until I reached middle age.
I dropped it
secure in its plastic binder into a cardboard carton on a chair outside his
office door. And waited. It was my first fully fleshed out paper as a
pre-med-English-major, and I knew that what he might have to say about it would
affect the course of the rest of my life.
He had told us that they would be read by the end of the week and we
could come by at that time to pick them up from that same carton. Rumor had it that he would not actually read
them, that they would be read by one of his graduate assistants. But even what they had to say about them
would be life altering—they were his
GAs, weren’t they?
With my Modern
Lit classmates I waited for hours in the corridor of Hamilton Hall on the day
the papers were to be returned to us. It
was obvious that very little showering had occurred that week—we well all that
anxious. It was a hot day and, because
of our ripeness, it was with various forms of relief that word spread down the
hall that the papers had been placed in the box and we could rummage through the
pile to retrieve them.
Though I had
been among the first to line up, I allowed everyone to pass me by and was thus
the last to look for in my paper. There
it was, seemingly untouched and unread, alone in the bottom of the box. I gathered it to me, and as I walked back
toward my dorm, barely breathing, I thumbed through it.
I was distraught
to notice that the twenty-seven pages were seemingly untouched—there was not
one correction or anything underlined in red, much less any comment, however
brief, scrawled in any of the margins.
My first thought was that it was such a pathetic effort that the grad
assistant hadn’t even read all the way through much less shown it to Trilling.
I was
devastated. All I could think about was
how I would need to get back into my organic chemistry studies so I could
rescue at least a C grade or for me there would not only be nothing of mine
ever published in the Evergreen Review
but also no medical school. I saw my
future looming with me hunched in a windowless cubicle at a desk at an
insurance company.
I slinked back
to my room and collapsed on my bed, wondering if it was too late to get to the
lab and work on my titrations.
As I lay there
staring at the ceiling, maybe even contemplating if the light fixture would
support my weight on a rope, one of my floor mates, Gene Adam pounded on the
door. He was a real English major, on a
fast track to graduate school, who had taken three courses with Trilling, and
was eager to find out how I had done.
The answer was immediately apparent when he found me sprawled in despair
on my cot.
“What
happened? Did you flunk?”
“No,” I mumbled,
“Worse than that. He didn’t even look at
it. It came back blank--not a comment,
not a grade. He just tossed it back in
the box.”
Gene found the
paper on my desk and flipped through it.
I could see him shrugging his shoulders and muttering in confusion as he
turned each of the unmarked pages. But
just as he was about to toss it back, he slapped his hand on the desktop and
screamed at me, “I can’t believe you.
You’re a total moron. Look at
this.” He held the paper up to me with
the folder open to the blank page at the back that I had inserted to dress up
the look of the paper. “Look at what he wrote. I mean Trilling himself. I recognize his handwriting.”
I pulled myself
up off the bed and snatched the paper from him.
There in Trilling’s own delicate hand, in pencil, faint but still vivid,
and, to my eyes, throbbing was— “Well
written.” And circled, my grade, an A
minus.
*
* *
And so when two
weeks later, there was a flyer tacked to all the bulletin boards on campus, announcing
that Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, and Allen Ginsberg would be at Columbia for
a reading in McMillin Theater, and that Lionel
Trilling would introduce them, I grabbed my blanket, pillow, and two boxes
of cereal and raced over--it was scheduled for two days hence and I would need
to sleep and eat outside the theater entrance so I could be at the front of the
line and thus be able to get a seat in the first row. But since so many others
with folding chairs and sleeping bags had the same idea, when I arrived, the
line was already around the corner. I
knew I would have to settle for the balcony again, as at the City Center, which
was all right because these were my
people and my world.
And so I
squatted in line. But before my cereal
ran out, and the cold rains came, the staff at McMillin took pity on those
sprawled outside their door and let us buy tickets. Or maybe they were just tired of having to
step over our ragtag army of Trilling and Ginsberg acolytes. This, though, took away some of the
delicious opportunity to suffer for one’s art.
It felt good, however, to have spent at least one night on the pavement
in its service, and I needed to shave.
So, thrice-armed
with my ticket, my A minus, and my “Well written,” I took a break for the rest of the week from my sulfanilamide experiment and renewed my
acquaintance with the West End, thinking there was no better place to prepare
for what was upcoming.
I had not been
there for some time, not wanting to revisit the memories of my time with Lydia;
and thankfully did not find her there.
Just the welcoming greeting of Johnny the bartender, who without missing
a beat, as if I had been there just yesterday, asked, “The usual?” already
pulling on the Watney’s Ale siphon--my “usual.”
And on the
napkin on which Johnny rested my beer, I found myself beginning to write a
poem.
Though I had
immersed myself in my literature classes, during the prior six months I had
suspended all thoughts or even dreams of writing. I not only had made the pre-med-backup-plan
compromise; but, still not knowing what to do with my literary interests, under
relentless parental pressure to be responsible, I had not even begun to shrug
off that aspect of my culture that kept me tethered to practicalness. Thus I continued to be confused while
straddling my many worlds.
So from where
was this poem spawning?
these wooden streets
wet nimbused now
like starfish
crushed . . . .
And so on. Just this small napkin’s worth of words.
*
* *
For the Ginsberg
reading I remembered to bring along my pipe and beret, which I hoped would
distinguish me, make me noticeable up in the shadows of the balcony, now that I
was beginning to want to emerge from inconspicuousness.
The house was
packed. The entire literature faculty
was there, as were the graduate assistants and every English major, graduate
and undergraduate, including from Barnard—though I, with relief, again did not
see Lydia.
There were four
chairs on the stage and a podium.
Nothing else. Then suddenly, as if in a vision, they all appeared at once,
in a surge—following the ever elegant Trilling from the wings were Corso, in
tattered fatigues; Orlovsky, all blonde and tweedy; and Ginsberg, shuffling,
slumping, awkward, sheathed in denim. I
remember the clothes better than the poems, taking more note of how to look the part than the part itself—Would
I be Trilling? Certainly not Orlovsky,
reportedly Ginsberg’s lover. I could be
Corso, clearly the minor player, perhaps more suited as a model for my A-minus
talent. Ginsberg of Howl and Kaddish was beyond
imagining, though, in addition to my tweeds, I also had the denims.
First up was Orlovsky, happily brief because his writing
did not compare with the beauty of his lips or face or hair—“My body turned into sugar, poured into
tea. I found the meaning.” Nothing special.
And then there was Corso, twisted in a corkscrew at the
podium, who read in a sputtering staccato more appropriate for Greenwich
Village coffee houses than that baroque room—“I stand in the dark light of the dark street. And look up at my window, I was born there.” He read on and on as if lacking the
awareness of where he was located in the Beat pantheon or that, as a result, he
was to serve as the opening act.
Then at last it was Ginsberg’s turn. This was his first appearance back at the
university which years earlier had expelled him. Trilling rose to introduce him, smoothing his
jacket which had remained buttoned while he sat. In his impeccable half-British diction he
said something about how
after going through Howl twice, “I
find I do not know how to respond. The poem does not reach me. Its clue
doesn't appear."
At
this, Ginsberg, twisting in his seat, tossed one leg up over the left arm so he
would be turned aggressively toward his old professor. Peering at him, with a wry smile on his
already lined face. When he heard
Trilling say his name in public for the first time in literary history,
amplified in that great room, Ginsberg uncoiled his serpentine self and moved
toward the podium with a stride that had been transformed from the shuffle of
his arrival to pure panther. Trilling
returned to his seat, sat quickly, crossing his legs with considerable care so
as not to disturb the tight crease in his trousers.
Ginsberg
began by reading from “The Lion for Real.” He told us that he dedicated the poem to his
former teacher Lionel Trilling and that it described a series of spiritual
visions he had had while at Columbia (now I got the lion reference in the title), visions that had launched him on the
mystical quest that had become his obserssion had and etched those premature
lines in his cheeks. The poem, he said,
turning pointedly to face Trilling, also recounted the difficulty he had had in
explaining his visions to his friends, family, and especially his teachers. I think at that reference, he took a
half-step in Trilling’s direction, indicating that the poem reflected his own
despair and sense of spiritual isolation while at Columbia.
I do now remember one or two lines, which he then read,
without referring to the tortured pile of his papers on the podium, speaking
them in one long breath, off mike, leaning directly toward his mentor-adversary. We all needed to lean forward to hear them,
knowing clearly now that the Professor
Kandisky of the poem was Professor
Trilling!
sat by his side every night averting my eyes from his hungry motheaten
face
stopped eating myself he got weaker and roared at night while I had
nightmares
Eaten by lion in bookstore on Cosmic Campus, a lion myself starved by
Professor
Kandisky, dying in a lion's flophouse circus
Kandisky/Trilling
in a flophouse? Though there
were 1,400 of us packed into that theater, I sensed that everyone had stopped
breathing. Even the great scions of
literature gasped, including the ancient Moses Hadas, Columbia’s lion of Greek
Tragedy, which for him could have been fatal; and Mark Van Doren, of the Van
Doren literary dynasty, which included his disgraced quiz-show son Charles.
Ginsberg turned his back to his professor on the stage,
and very much into the microphone this time, looking up especially to those of
us breathless in the balcony, “Remember,” he said, imitating Trilling’s clipped
style, “All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear
extreme to the mass of men. It springs from the anguish of great souls.”
And without turning back to him, but still to us, Ginsberg
asked, “Isn’t that so Mr. Trilling?” If
the Great Hadas had been thinking in a Sophoclean mode, he must have sensed patricide.
*
* *
For the first time in my life I needed a drink and there was
of course only one place to seek it.
Though it was well past 11:00 p.m., Johnny was still on duty
and moved to the Watney’s tap as he saw me at the door. I had raced away from the commotion that
ensued at McMillin and when I got to the West End it was empty—every one of the
regulars had been at the event.
I was
pulsating.
I had had my own
vision. Though it would not lead to a
lifetime-long spiritual quest or probably even many publishable poems, at least
right then I knew I would never again set foot in a chemistry lab and there
would be no medical school. I didn’t
know where I was headed, but it was surely not there. Even if to oblivion.
I collapsed onto
my stool and in one swallow sucked in half the draft. I played and replayed the tape in my head of
what had transpired—especially Ginsburg’s call to us in the balcony about the
“anguish of souls”—actually quoting back to him and to us Trilling’s own words,
but as transmuted up to us, through the medium of Ginsberg, they felt as if
they had reshaped the very neurons in my cerebellum.
Thus stimulated,
on a second cocktail napkin, in almost automatic writing, as if the words were
coming to me from a source outside myself, I wrote, to conclude the poem I had
begun a few days ago--
on these I trod
wet now as the wood
after passing the baby clams
but never having asked
if you cried
when your father died
And with that
the front door swung open and in a rush of Beats in Army-Navy clothes, at the
head of the pack, was Ginsberg, with the radiant Orlovsky at his side.
“Johnny,” he
cried, with arms outstretched as he made his way to the bar.
And Johnny said,
“The usual?” reaching for a bottle of Ballantine.
But Ginsberg
paused, as if disoriented, at the horseshoe end of the bar near where I sat
frozen to my stool. Looking around for
Johnny who had disappeared below the bar to get Ginsberg’s beer from the cooler
where he kept the bottles. As Johnny’s
head reemerged, while still half bent over, he waved to me with the back of his
hand. To get up. To move.
Move!
I was on
Ginsberg’s stool. Which now felt like a
griddle. I leapt off it as if afraid it
would roast and flay my body.
“That’s all
right,” Ginsberg said to me, touching my shoulder with the sting of his hand,
“Stay where you are. I can sit
anywhere. After all that, I need a beer,
maybe two, and then we’re off.” With a
wink toward Orlovsky, he to me added, “You look as if you belong here.” He nodded to Johnny, indicating everything
was fine with where I was sitting, but Johnny’s look back to me made it clear
that I had still better move, and fast. Not that I needed any extra prodding.
Seeking
inconspicuousness again, I ducked into a dark booth on the other side of the
bar, not pausing to take my Watney’s with me.
Ginsberg lowered himself onto his
stool and was immediately engulfed by the crowd that continued to surge in from
McMillin.
Though I was
physically present, the surreality of that entire evening, now with Ginsberg
unbelievably looming fewer than ten feet away, turned the West End into a mix
of dreams and cinematic images, with me more a distant, wishful observer than a
physical presence.
Almost
immediately, I felt myself slipping out of consciousness. It was more than the Watney’s taking hold of
me. And as I was literally about to slide
off the leather banquette, just as I was about to collapse under the influence,
and the bench, I saw as if it was a hallucination, towering before me, the head
of Ginsberg haloed in strobes of quanta.
“Is this yours?”
he asked, holding something out toward me.
“My what?” I
somehow managed to mumble, desperately trying to hold on to the table.
“This, this
napkin,” his hand was still extended. “I
found it where you were sitting. At the
bar,” he smiled, “At your seat.”
“Yes, my
napkin. Thank you. I left it there. Sorry.
I meant to take it with me. And
my beer.”
“You should have
it because I saw you were writing on it.”
“I was just
doodling. I’m not really a writer or
anything.” I was hoping I could disappear
forever.
“Actually, I
thought it wasn’t bad. I liked the
reference to the ‘baby clams.’”
He turned to his
coterie who were watching and listening from the bar, and said to them more
than to me, “Its clue appeared to
me.”
Then he was
gone, back out into the blare of Broadway, in pursuit of his vision, he and
they embracing in fits of ribald laughter.
*
* *
I did in fact
return to the lab and did in fact managed to eek out a C plus in Organic,
enough to guarantee at least a fighting chance of being accepted by a
second-tier medical school somewhere in the middle of the country.
I had taken that
beer-soaked napkin back to my room and joined it with the first one, feeling
that the two parts formed something resembling an actual poem, the clue of which was sufficiently allusive
to me to pump me full of enough courage to submit it for publication to a few
small presses. And, to my surprise and
delight, before even submitting any applications to Med schools, I heard from
the mimeographed poetry magazine, Black
Sun, that my crushed starfish poem would be published--if they could get
enough money together to buy ink for the printing machine.
Though in fact
it was published there, nothing much came of that. And to this day I wonder what would have
happened if Trilling had given me a straight
A on my Kafka paper.
Would that have made
any difference?
